tldr: Depends on the size of the company you work for…

We’re hearing about AI-fueled layoffs, but where? The largest companies are doing the largest layoffs, in the name of short-term bottom-line gains and not much else.

Publicly traded companies employ half of public sector workers. By law c-corps are expected to return value to shareholders; currently large companies are making market gains by losing people. This is a way to cover up slow sales in a stagnating economy, while still being able to show financial gains. 

It’s a twisted way to “make money” — and it only appears in companies that are incentivized to display profits [hello, stock market] with no punishment for brutal methods. 

But, what about the other half of private company employees? Or nonprofit workers, worker coop owners, civic employees, or self-employed people?

These are smaller enterprises, not required or incentivized to show profit in the same way – and their decisions can be much more human-centered and focused on the long game: growing people vs growing bottom lines and profit.

The smaller companies and nonprofits that my colleagues and I tend to work with and for aren’t focused on a bottom line for external shareholders; they’re focused on their people, their clients’ needs, and the new realities of the current economy: slow, less money, more hesitancy among all the change.

They’re upskilling, creating space for innovation and learning how to explore and implement AI in place rather than in theory, and trying to figure out how to keep good employees while adapting.

In a recent conversation with some other civic tech leaders, we discussed how we’re working with our teams to make space for AI exploration, experiments, and ~upskilling~. We saw learning and adoption appear in:
> innovation spaces; where people are asked to use AI either to explore problems or as part of solutions.
> 1:1 mentorship, as in “here’s how I solved/did/started this – let me show you” where a light bulb went off for someone

This is a concrete example of the difference between main street vs Wall Street businesses: growing people vs growing bottom lines and profit.

I’ve always been much more a fan of smaller “Main Street” organizations for many reasons: the opportunity for democratic input, have influence, direct connections to the solutions being implemented, often more interesting challenges — but the part about how non-traded companies can also make more humane people decisions didn’t really land until now. 

Most people don’t start companies to extract and exploit — obviously there are edge cases — but instead to create. If you were going to start a company and create jobs for people, wouldn’t you do whatever you could to keep them employed, happy, AND innovative? 

That is the power of smaller, locally-controlled businesses.

That said, layoff season is here for all organizations due to the pullback in the US and global economy. We’re seeing this in large companies as well as smaller ones. 

The firm I work 4 days a week for has laid off 50% of the employees as compared to April, due simply to not having enough contracts. No work > no revenue > burning down reserves > no payroll > layoffs. 

So what’s a regular person to do, whether you work somewhere big or tiny? I’m still employed because I am strategic and can run business experiments — part of why I’m employed is my “T-shape” skill set: deep on a few things, broad on many. I am constantly expanding what I can do, with a focus on skills that are human-centered and deal with things that are impossible to automate: people as they move through decisions and adapt to change.

Video edited on Kapwing

It’s a strange time to be aware of how economies and business work, and feel a bit like a small ship in a very, very big sea.